Babci does have her mushrooming standards

I did another quick mushrooming drive-by with Babci last night. If you read this week’s article, you probably laughed that she was willing to have me risk life and limb to jump over an electric fence to grab a few mushrooms. I wouldn’t and she’s still bitter about it. As we were driving through a neighborhood, she chastised me under her breath again that “Oh yeah, you’re afraid of people..I guess we shouldn’t look here.”

Just then we drove by a cemetery. I offer to pull over. Me: “Here’s a nice spot for mushrooms. Want to pick them out of this cemetery?” She shudders. Her: “No, I won’t pick them.” Me: “Not even if there was the biggest patch ever?” Her: “No way, I’m too squeamish to eat those. I have my standards.” She stopped bugging me after that.

Well Heeled – We only pick mushrooms that are easy to tell apart from their poisonous counterparts. For example, morels are very distinctive looking. They look like brains. There is a poisonous twin, but the poisonous one is solid and the morels are hollow inside. It’s pretty obvious which is which if you know what to look for. Some of the gilled ones are hard to tell apart though. The gilled ones that grow on trees are usually okay, and chanterelles grow like an upturned umbrella in the wind, but many of the others require more sophisticated methods for identification, so we just skip them altogether even though there are probably a bunch that are good to eat. The Italian mushroom pickers are more adventurous and do have additional home methods that they use to tell the gilled ones apart. Boletus have a spongy bottom instead of gills..again, most spongy bottom ones are okay but I picked one that babci had never seen before and she decided to not risk it and threw it out. It had also not been touched by any slugs which was another sign that made her worried. Again, there are beginner level varieties that most anyone can look for like oyster mushrooms. They don’t really have any poisonous look alikes and are very easy to identify.

Shanendoah – I know, it’s nice. Babci is a tough critic. She was so critical of everything as a teenager, I just learned to tune her out completely. Luckily now that we live together, I do realize she does have some wise things to say once in a while and I have learned to listen again.

That is fantastic. What if Babci saw some abandoned golf clubs in the cemetery that could be used for a million different things. Would she take those home or leave them there? Are all things forbidden in the cemetery, or just mushrooms?

Kris – good question and hilarious too. Yes, everything is forbidden in cemetaries. You know how old people tell the same story over and over? Well Babci has this story about how a doctor’s wife use to go to a cemetary and steal fresh flowers from people’s graves until one day she got caught. The moral was she had money but stole from dead people anyway. The golf clubs would stay too unless they were in the cemetary dumpster. Then I think she’d be okay with taking them.